When we reported on the release of Xfce 4.8, we ignored a statement inside the release announcement about the lack of new features coming to the BSD world. The statement was a bit disconnected from the rest of the press release, but Xfce developer Jannis Pohlmann has published a blog post giving a few more details about the issue.

Hmmmm, don't you know that the most widely distributed program in the *ix world is OpenSSH? Written by a subset of the OpenBSD devs in two forms.

He said DESKTOP. OpenSSH itself has nothing to do with the desktop. The package for OpenSSH seems to be a bit over two megabytes. I don't think that compares next to a multi-hundred-megabyte desktop environment (nor XFCE).

One is the version shipped with OpenBSD. When that code is audited and tested OpenSSH Portable is built for the benefit of other *ix-like OSes.

There is no such term as "*ix-like". It's unix-like (capitalization about personal taste).

Then there's a bunch of people who like to use "*nix" and such for whatever reason.